Ill Wind

"Joanne."

"How long have you been on the road?"

"Isn't that my line?" I asked him. "I think it's been about thirty-six hours, but I'm really not too sure anymore."

"Any sleep?"

"Not so much."

"I guess you know it's not safe to drive like that."

"Safer than stopping," I said, and then wondered why I had; I don't confide, especially not in normal, mundane people. David nodded and looked out the window. "So how long have you been on the road?"

"A while now. I like it. It's beautiful out there." He nodded toward the other side of the glass, where things were whipping by at Mustang speed. "Everybody should get out in the world for a while, just so they know who they are, and why."

It sounded philosophical and New Agey to me, but hey, I freely admit I'm cynical. "Thanks, I'll take indoor plumbing, cooked food, and reliable heating any time. Nature's great. I just don't think she likes us very much."

"She likes us fine," David replied. "But she doesn't stack the deck for one side or the other, and we seem to think she should. Cockroaches get the same shots as humans, in her view. And I think that's fair."

"I'm not about fair. I'm about winning."

"Nobody wins," he said. "Or don't you watch the Discovery Channel?"

"More of a Comedy Central fan, myself. And don't tell me that you've got a cabin with cable stashed in your backpack."

He out and out grinned this time. "No, but sometimes I take a room at a motel so I can cleaned up and sleep in a bed for a change. You got something against the Discovery Channel?"

"Adult pay-per-view," I advised him. "Only way to go."

Strangely, I felt less sleepy and less fogged over with weariness since he'd gotten in the car. Maybe there really was something to misery loving company. Plus, a little casual flirting never failed to get my blood moving.

He looked over at me with a smile that was just saved from being cynical by his gentle eyes.

"Real life," he said, "is always more interesting. You just never know what will happen."

What happened was that we drove for another thirty minutes, and the skies were clear and menace free, and I finally was able to pull in for a pit stop at a place called Krazy Ed's Gas 'n Food. Krazy Ed himself ran the register. I don't know if he was Krazy, but he was meaner than a pit bull, and I'd have been willing to bet that he'd killed a few would-be burglars in his time. David stayed quiet, polite, and he got out as quickly as possible with his haul of cheese doodles and Twinkies and diet soda. Evidently his oneness with Mother Nature did not extend to eating organic-or even partially organic- food.

Delilah drank her fill at the pumps, I slid my feet in and out of the now-torturous high heels and asked Krazy Ed if there was anyplace in town he could recommend as a clothing store. Apparently there was. It was a little place called the mall.

"Mall," I echoed after David and I were back in the car, safely out of Krazy Ed's reach. "How big a mall can there be in a town this size? A Wal-Mart I could understand, wherever two or three of us are gathered together, but . . ."

David didn't say anything. He just pointed to the road sign directly in front of us. It read, green hills outlet mall, biggest in pa! Although, by my calculations, we were just wee miles short of being out of Pennsylvania altogether.

"Oh," I said. "Pretty big, I guess."

So we followed the signs.

Big wasn't the word; the place was frigging enormous. I'd seen major airports that covered less land mass, and the cars-you could have taken a dozen big-city car dealerships and stuck them together in one contiguous lot, and you'd still have fewer vehicles than were choked into narrow rows around the Green Hills Outlet Mall. I offered David the chance to get a ride with some of the thousands of other mall shoppers, but he politely declined and walked into the place with me, hands in his overcoat pockets and eyes full of sly amusement as if he were on some sociology field trip. I wondered how many malls he'd ever been to. The clothes he was wearing weren't really hand-me-downs after all-blue checkered flannel shirt, blue jeans, lived-in hiking boots, that vintage overcoat. It all looked good quality, with no ground-in dirt-in fact, recently washed. Like David himself. He smelled lightly of male sweat, but nothing stinkier. If he'd been living rough, it certainly hadn't been any rougher than most vacationers.

Which raised a question, because most guys on the road for a couple of years tended to wear miles on their faces. His was mileage free.

Still. I checked Oversight. He was placidly un-menacing.

"I just need a few things," I told him. "Clothes. Stuff like that. You can go to the food court if you want to and eat something with some actual nutritional content for a change. My treat."

We were, in fact, looking at the food court, which was larger and noisier than Barnum and Bailey's big top. Even the pickiest taste could find something in that maze of color and plastic-from hamburgers to Szechuan, curry to pork pies. David looked mildly impressed. I handed him a twenty-dollar bill. "Knock yourself out. See you back here in an hour. If I don't see you, I'll assume you've caught another ride, okay?"

He pocketed the twenty without protest and nodded without looking my way. "I'll be here," he said. "Don't forget me."

Not likely. I looked back over my shoulder when I got to the escalator and saw he was standing there, watching me. The round circles of his glasses caught neon fire as he turned his head, and he walked off into the crowd with his overcoat swinging gracefully around him.

He really was-something. I wasn't quite sure what. Why the hell had I picked him up? No, that wasn't the question. A girl could have the occasional weakness for a cute, mysterious stranger. The question was, why the hell was I still with him?

I made the decision that when I was done here, I'd slip out the side exit and leave him on his own. Hell, I'd given him a ride, contributed a twenty to the cause-I'd done more than my duty, right? And there was, well, me to consider. I had my own problems, dammit.

Yes. Definitely. That's what I would do.

The escalator delivered me to a whole different level of color, this one full of clothes. Trashy clothes, flashy clothes, trendy clothes, clothes even my grandmother would have found too dowdy to wear. I picked a place called Violent Velvet and decided that it deserved a once-over for the name alone.

The color of the season, I discovered, was purple- well, last season, because it was an outlet mall and they were unloading stock that hadn't sold, but that didn't matter. I liked purple. I liked purple velvet even better, and since the spring wasn't so warm, it constituted a comfort-versus-fashion challenge.

Half an hour later I emerged from the fitting room wearing purple hip-hugger pants, a stretch lace white shirt, and a flared purple jacket that harked back to Edwardian styles. Everything I was wearing, from underwear out, was new. It felt so good, it was almost sexual. I paid up, bagged two more outfits and a pair of purple satin pajamas, and reveled in the feel of flat-heeled, fashionably clunky shoes. My feet were shell-shocked but grateful. A quick fifteen-minute stop at the nearby convenience store netted me tampons, toothpaste, toothbrush, travel-size mouth-wash, makeup, and-because a good Girl Scout is always prepared-a discreet travel-size package of condoms. But, I reminded myself again, I was ditching David. So the condoms were more in the way of wishful thinking.

Anyway, it had nothing to do with him. In the outfit I was wearing, I might have a date before I even made it down the escalator.

I was basking in girl power when suddenly the hair along my scalp prickled, and I knew something was wrong. Weather? No, that was okay, a quick survey of Oversight told me all was well. Something else. I couldn't pin it down, but the feeling persisted. Something was wrong here, in the middle of all these busy people, all these stores chewing money at a Las Vegas rate. Something to do with air, I thought. But not weather-

I realized I was feeling faint, and I didn't understand why. I'd been feeling great just a few seconds ago, loving my violent velvet, ready to take on the world. Now I needed to sit down.

I found an unoccupied Victorian-style wrought-iron bench and sat down next to some squatty pine trees. They looked unconvinced by the skylight above, but a finch had somehow found its way in and was perched on one of the branches, watching me with beady finch-eyes. It made a sharp sound that sounded dull and smeared to me, as if I were hearing it underwater, and it snapped its wings and flew away.

Fainter. Sounds fading. I couldn't understand what was happening. I was breathing faster, but the part of my brain in charge of total freakout was shrieking that something was wrong, wrong, wrong.

I was still trying to figure it out when I slid sideways and fell over on the bench. Cool white-painted iron against my cheek. Felt good. So tired.

People gathered. Lips moved. No sound reached me. I was gasping now, panting fast, and because my hand was by my face, I could see that my fingernail beds were turning a pure, delicate blue.

Something about-about-experiment at school-

Oh, God, I couldn't breathe. No, that's not right, I was breathing, but there just wasn't anything there to breathe. Nothing but my own carbon dioxide.

I remembered, as suddenly and clearly as if it were happening in front of me, that I'd done this before. Not as the subject. As the experimenter.

I'd done this to a lab rat. Removed all the oxygen from the air surrounding him and made it a clear poisonous shell around him, so no matter where he ran, no matter how he tried to get away-

I hadn't killed the rat. I'd popped the bubble once I'd mastered the technique, and the rat-white, with a pink nose, funny how you remember those things- had scurried off unharmed.

But whoever was practicing on me wasn't popping the bubble.

Focus, dammit!

My brain was starting to send out hysterical flashes, distress signals. Flashes of color across my eyes. A strangely realistic memory of my mother reaching down for me, giant-size in my perspective. Delilah spinning on the road. Lewis, lying on the ground, blood dripping down his face, reaching out for the last key to his power.

I realized I had stopped breathing and couldn't seem to make myself start again.

Something wrong. What was it?

Clear as a bell, I heard my mother say, I wish this didn't have to happen. She sounded so disappointed in me.

Yorenson. Disappointed. Standing at the head of the class, listening to my wrong answer. Really, Joanne, you know this. You know how to do this.

Couldn't remember. It was dark. Very dark. Warm in there, in the night, but no stars, no moon.

No. Hallway. Something at the end. I was moving toward it without any sensation of moving, there was light, and light and-

I was sitting in a creaking wooden school chair, and the room smelled faintly of Pine-Sol and chalk, and Yorenson pulled at his tweed jacket like a fussy girl and asked me a question that I didn't understand, and I felt panic rising like storm surge along the coast. I had to get this right, had to. He looked at me in disappointment and turned back to the blackboard. He drew an air molecule, chalk squeaking.

I was the only one in the room. Staying after class. Remedial weather theory. No, that wasn't right, I had never-

Pay attention, he said, without turning around. Squeaking chalk. This takes delicacy, my dear.

On the board. The answer was on the board. All I had to do was-was-

Crystal sparkles around the edge of Yorenson's blackboard, eating. Darkness all around, eating the answer.

No.

I reached out with my hand, and the chemical structure on the board became reds and blues and yellows, three-dimensional, spinning, and I plucked away one thing that shouldn't be there-a yellow grape in the wrong place on the stem-and stuck a blue one in its place.

Again. Faster. Reaching for thousands of spinning models, millions, billions, and it wasn't my hand that was reaching, it was my mind, it was me.

Yorenson turned from the blackboard and put the chalk down and smiled at me.

Breathe, he said. Don't forget to breathe.

-and suddenly there was sweet, sweet air in my lungs, and the noise, my God, the noise was terrific, people shouting, feet running, voices, some kind of alarm going off in a store, the hyperactive beat of music in the distance, sweet, sweet chaos.

I swept in breath after breath after breath and listened to my pounding heart and thought, I hated that goddamn class.

Someone was cushioning my head. I blinked and focused and saw that it was David. He looked deathly pale, and I could feel his hands trembling. For some reason his glasses were off, and his face looked different. Stronger. His eyes glittered with flecks of copper.

"Hi," I whispered. He started to say something, but didn't.

Somebody slapped an oxygen mask I didn't need over my face.

Funny how a near death experience can make you hungry. I sat in the food court with David and gulped down a heroic meal of beef kebab, saffron rice, samosas, and some kind of designer water without bubbles or aftertaste. David still looked spooked. He hadn't said a word to me during the hysteria of the paramedic visit, or the argument over whether or not I was brain-damaged enough to go to the hospital. . . hadn't, in fact, said anything to anybody. He'd just stood there at the edge of the chaos, arms folded, watching me with a frown curved between his eyebrows.

It was kind of cute, really.

I had to sign releases and I-won't-sue waivers, not to mention endure dire predictions of disability and death from the local doc-in-a-box who'd arrived on the scene with personal injury lawyer in tow.

By the time it was over, I'd grabbed David by the elbow and said, "I'm starving," and he still hadn't said anything through the entire walking, ordering, and eating process.

Now, as I gulped the last of my water and scooped up the last errant grains of orange-specked rice, he leaned forward and asked, "Done now?"

"Guess so." I ate a last mouthful of naan, licked my fingers, and used the napkin as a last resort. People were still watching me, either because of my excellent fashion sense or because they were waiting for me to fall down and foam at the mouth again. Probably the most exciting thing to happen in the mall since the Christmas pageant.

He was watching me that way, too. "You want to tell me what's going on with you?"

"Not really," I said. "Listen, no offense, but I think it's better if you just take the twenty I gave you and look for another ride. It isn't that I don't like you, it's just that-"

"You might have another one of those?"

Yeah. I might, this time while driving Delilah at top speed. Or next time, my invisible enemy might decide to wrap a mantle of poison around David instead of me, to distract me while he pulled another little trick out of his magical hat. Somebody really didn't want me to reach Lewis. Who? Why? Who even knew I was looking? The Djinn, of course, but Djinn didn't act without orders from their masters.

And that Djinn was Lewis's, and if Lewis had given me the directions to meet him, he'd hardly be trying to kill me, too. Well, Paul knew, sort of. And Star. Shit. Speculation was getting me nowhere.

"If you have another one of those fits, you're going to need help," David said. "Besides, I get the feeling you're driving a long way. I could use the lift. Really. I've got a long way to go."

"Yeah?" It was the first information David had offered, however oblique. "To where?"

"Phoenix," he said. "My brother's in trouble. I'm trying to get to him."

I found a last grain of rice and coaxed it onto my fork. "What's his name?"

David hesitated, then looked away. "Joseph."

"Biblical theme."

"We're a very religious family."

I shoved the tray away and put my hands flat on the table. They weren't shaking anymore, which was an improvement. And I didn't feel anything much happening around me, not from an eldritch standpoint, anyway-plenty of screaming kids, arguing adults, booming bass from stereo stores, babble in a hundred languages. All in the real world.

What had almost killed me didn't belong here, in this world. My enemy had been precise this time, tried to get at me personally. Now that I was on my guard, he wouldn't have as much opportunity. Next time, he might try something messier.

I couldn't afford to be around people when that happened.

"Phoenix," I repeated. "Look, seriously, it's not safe to be around me, okay? Call it what you want-epileptic fits, demonic possession, poison, Mafia enforcers. It's just not safe. So do yourself a favor, buy a bus ticket, catch a commercial flight, rent a car, just turn around and walk away. Right now."

He looked at me seriously from across the teal blue plastic table. Behind him, a neon light sculpture of a parrot climbed a tiled pillar. The brilliant colors made him look drab, a bird in winter colors.

"You're serious?" he asked.

"As a heart attack."

He finally nodded and said, "Okay."

Well, what had I expected? Argument? Heroic measures? Declarations of undying love and loyalty? Hell, he was a road dude, just a guy who'd asked for a ride and gotten in over his head. Cute, but not playing at my power level.